Part 4 (2/2)
”And I've seen them lose it, sometimes, rather than shut down,” the manufacturer remarked; ”lose it hand over hand, to keep the men at work; and then as soon as the tide turned the men would strike for higher wages.
You have no idea of the ingrat.i.tude of those people.” He said this toward the minister, as if he did not wish to be thought hard; and, in fact, he was a very kindly man.
”Yes,” replied the minister, ”that is one of the most sinister features of the situation. They seem really to regard their employers as their enemies. I don't know how it will end.”
”I know how it would end if I had my way,” said the professor. ”There wouldn't be any labor unions, and there wouldn't be any strikes.”
”That is all very well,” said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I always liked in him, ”as far as the strikes are concerned, but I don't understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal process of 'laying off.' The law of demand and supply I respect as much as any one--it's something like the const.i.tution; but, all the same, I should object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I'm probably not so wasteful as a working-man generally is; still, I haven't laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income went on or not. Perhaps the professor has.” The professor did not say, and we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded: ”I don't see how those fellows stand it.”
”They don't, all of them,” said the doctor. ”Or their wives and children don't. Some of them die.”
”I wonder,” the lawyer pursued, ”what has become of the good old American fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five thousand men to take their places in the afternoon--and not men who are turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the very thing the strikers have done.”
”That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes,” the professor made haste to interpose, as if he had not quite liked to appear averse to the interests of the workman; no one likes to do that. ”If there were anything at all to be hoped from them, it would be another matter.”
”Yes, but that isn't the point, quite,” said the lawyer.
”By-the-way, what is the point?” I asked, with my humorous lightness.
”Why, I supposed,” said the banker, ”it was the question how the working cla.s.ses amused their elegant leisure. But it seems to be almost anything else.”
We all applauded the neat touch, but the Altrurian eagerly entreated: ”No, no; never mind that now. That is a matter of comparatively little interest. I would so much rather know something about the status of the working-man among you.”
”Do you mean his political status? It's that of every other citizen.”
”I don't mean that. I suppose that in America you have learned, as we have in Altruria, that equal political rights are only means to an end, and as an end have no value or reality. I meant the economic status of the working-man, and his social status.”
I do not know why we were so long girding up our loins to meet this simple question. I myself could not have hopefully undertaken to answer it; but the others were each in their way men of affairs, and practically acquainted with the facts, except perhaps the professor; but he had devoted a great deal of thought to them, and ought to have been qualified to make some sort of response. But even he was silent; and I had a vague feeling that they were all somehow reluctant to formulate their knowledge, as if it were uncomfortable or discreditable. The banker continued to smoke quietly on for a moment; then he suddenly threw his cigar away.
”I like to free my mind of cant,” he said, with a short laugh, ”when I can afford it, and I propose to cast all sorts of American cant out of it in answering your question. The economic status of the working-man among us is essentially the same as that of the working-man all over the civilized world. You will find plenty of people here, especially about election time, to tell you differently, but they will not be telling you the truth, though a great many of them think they are. In fact, I suppose most Americans honestly believe because we have a republican form of government, and manhood suffrage, and so on, that our economic conditions are peculiar, and that our working-man has a status higher and better than that of the working-man anywhere else. But he has nothing of the kind. His circ.u.mstances are better, and provisionally his wages are higher, but it is only a question of years or decades when his circ.u.mstances will be the same and his wages the same as the European working-man's. There is nothing in our conditions to prevent this.”
”Yes, I understood from our friend here,” said the Altrurian, nodding toward me, ”that you had broken only with the political tradition of Europe in your Revolution; and he has explained to me that you do not hold all kinds of labor in equal esteem; but--”
”What kind of labor did he say we did hold in esteem?” asked the banker.
”Why, I understood him to say that if America meant anything at all it meant the honor of work, but that you distinguished and did not honor some kinds of work so much as others; for instance, domestic service, or personal attendance of any kind.”
The banker laughed again. ”Oh, he drew the line there, did he? Well, we all have to draw the line somewhere. Our friend is a novelist, and I will tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We don't honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow himself likes it; he doesn't if he's got any sense. The rest of us feel that it's _infra dig._, and hope n.o.body will find out that we ever worked with our hands for a living. I'll go further,” said the banker, with the effect of whistling prudence down the wind, ”and I will challenge any of you to gainsay me from his own experience or observation. How does esteem usually express itself? When we wish, to honor a man, what do we do?”
”Ask him to dinner,” said the lawyer.
”Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a fellow gets up, if he gets up high enough, we offer him some sort of social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has left off working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to his past on account of the present. But there isn't a working-man, I venture to say, in any city or town, or even large village, in the whole length and breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if he is still working at his trade. I don't mean, merely, that he is excluded from rich and fas.h.i.+onable society, but from the society of the average educated and cultivated people. I'm not saying he is fit for it; but I don't care how intelligent and agreeable he might be--and some of them are astonis.h.i.+ngly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better than to talk with them--all of our invisible fences are up against him.”
The minister said: ”I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite natural? Children seem to feel no sort of social difference among themselves.”
”We can hardly go to children for a type of social order,” the professor suggested.
”True,” the minister meekly admitted. ”But somehow there is a protest in us somewhere against these arbitrary distinctions--something that questions whether they are altogether right. We know that they must be, and always have been, and always will be, and yet--well, I will confess it--I never feel at peace when I face them.”
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